| Okay ... this is another one of those slippery terms. As a onetime student of European history I got hung up on the etymology [0] Historically, the medieval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie", they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production I was incorrectly equating "upper class" with these "landlords", but I guess as of the French revolution, with the Aristocracy overthrown the semantics shifted and "haute bourgeois" became the term for the ruling class. Contemporarily, the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" (noun) identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum I would contend that the modern phenomenon of "the 1%" more closely resembles the aristocracy of old than Haute Bourgeois but I would be at odds with accepted terminology. So yeah Bill Gates is from a Bourgeois background (particular grade is unclear) but arguably now occupies a distant Aristocratic stratum beyond Haute Bourgeois. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie#Etymology |